The average predictability (aka informativity) of a word in context has been shown to condition word duration (Seyfarth, 2014). All else being equal, words that tend to occur in more predictable environments are shorter than words that tend to occur in less predictable environments. One account of the informativity effect on duration is that the acoustic details of probabilistic reduction are stored as part of a word's mental representation. Other research has argued that predictability effects are tied to prosodic structure in integral ways. With the aim of assessing a potential prosodic basis for informativity effects in speech production, this study extends past work in two directions; it investigated informativity effects in another large language, Mandarin Chinese, and broadened the study beyond word duration to additional acoustic dimensions, pitch and intensity, known to index prosodic prominence. The acoustic information of content words was extracted from a large telephone conversation speech corpus with over 400,000 tokens and 6000 word types spoken by 1655 individuals and analyzed for the effect of informativity using frequency statistics estimated from a 431 million word subtitle corpus. Results indicated that words with low informativity have shorter durations, replicating the effect found in English. In addition, informativity had significant effects on maximum pitch and intensity, two phonetic dimensions related to prosodic prominence. Extending this interpretation, these results suggest that predictability is closely linked to prosodic prominence, and that the lexical representation of a word includes phonetic details associated with its average prosodic prominence in discourse. In other words, the lexicon absorbs prosodic influences on speech production.

上下文中一个单词的平均可预测性（又称信息性）已被证明可以限制单词的持续时间（Seyfarth，2014）。在所有其他条件相同的情况下，倾向于在可预测性更高的环境中出现的单词要短于在难以预测的环境中倾向于出现的单词。信息量对持续时间影响的一个解释是，概率降低的声音细节作为单词的心理表示形式存储。其他研究认为，可预测性的影响与韵律结构紧密联系在一起。为了评估语音产生中信息性影响的潜在韵律基础，本研究将工作扩展到两个方向。它研究了另一种主要语言普通话对信息的影响，并将研究范围扩展到单词持续时间以外的其他声学尺寸，音调和强度，这些都可以识别韵律韵律。内容单词的声音信息是从一个大型电话交谈语音语料库中提取的，该语料库由1655个用户说出了40万多个令牌和6000个单词类型，并使用从4.31亿个单词字幕语料库估计的频率统计数据分析了信息性的影响。结果表明，具有低信息性的单词的持续时间较短，可以复制英语中的效果。此外，信息化对最大音高和强度也有重要影响，这两个音素与韵律韵律突出有关。扩展这种解释，这些结果表明，可预测性与韵律突显密切相关，并且单词的词汇表述包括与其在语音中的平均韵律突出相关的语音细节。换句话说，词典吸收了韵律对语音产生的影响。